Upgrading from 9800GTX to ???

[mustrum]

Originally Posted by CaptNKILL

In your situation it certainly is.

You really haven't had to buy anything for your water cooling setup since you used it on an Athlon XP?

I plan on using my cooler for a very long time as well. Its still one of the best air coolers money can buy and I can hit 4.25Ghz on my Q9550 with it (too much voltage for my liking though ).

Yeah! A good copper CPU cooler from 10 years ago is still as good as the ones you buy now.
It cools my 3.5 ghz quadcore perfectly well. It`s loading at 45 degrees and idling at 32 to 33 degrees celcius. You could drop a few degrees on the load temp with a top of the line cooler and a bigger radiator maybe but the benefit would be very small.

The problem with GPU watercooling is that a complete cooler is extremely expensive and you can`t use it on different cards. I had such coolers on some cards and while they worked well they did improve overclocks by only maybe 20 to 30 mhz wich isn`t really worth it. I would do it on those screaming loud cards only.
The other solution is using a cpu cooler on a GPU wich actually works better but leaves the memory uncooled so you gotta take care of that as well. Hopefully my new 5770`s are silent enough so i can leave em as they are.

Edit: I had to do something. I had to buy a new mount for the CPU cooler because the socked of the XP was held by i believe 6 "noses". Now i got a simple metal bar pressing the CPU in place wich works on pretty much any socket.

[john19055]

I would go with a HD5850 ,it will play any game at 1680x1050 plus it is DX 11,and if you have a good 650watt power supply then it will handle a HD5870,and it just about as fast as a GTX 295 in a lot of games ,plus you have DX 11 when them games start comeing out in larger numbers.IMO i just would go with new hardware then older hardware if I was going to upgrade.